- Hey, everybody, welcome to swimuniversity.com.
My name is Matt Giovanisci
and today we're gonna talk
about getting rid of algae in your swimming pool.
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As you can see at the pool behind us,
it's a little bit green,
it's not too dark, but it's light enough
and it has just enough algae
in it that we need to take care of it.
Now, what we're gonna do is a few things.
First, we're actually gonna vacuum any sediment
out of the bottom to waste, all right,
directly out of the filter, not going through,
not coming back in the return lines, but directly out
and we'll show you how to do that shortly.
The second thing we're gonna do is we're gonna brush
down all the walls, the sides, the steps, the ladders,
just brush it all down with a brush
attached to a telescopic pole and get all that algae
that's sticking to the walls, actually into the water.
Then we're gonna test the water to make sure
that our pH and acclivity are correct.
If they are, we'll go as planned,
if they're not, we're gonna add either pH
or alkalinity or whatever we need to bring those levels up.
And then the final thing we're gonna do
is we're gonna shock the heck out of it.
Okay, so this pool's a light green,
so it probably only needs a double shock.
And now this pool was a 19,000 gallon pool,
and the bags of shock that I have, which are made
with calcium hypochlorite work for 10,000 gallons each.
So one bag or actually two bags would do the trick
to cover this 19,000 gallon pool.
However, I'm gonna double shock it,
so we're gonna do four bags of shock.
Now I'm gonna do it during the day, but it is cloudy,
you really wanna shock your pool at night
or when it's getting dark out
so that the sun doesn't eat up all that chlorine.
Now first let's get started by vacuuming
out the sediment at the bottom of the pool.
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Okay, now that we have all the sediment vacuumed out
to waste from the bottom of the pool, we're gonna go ahead
and we're gonna brush down the walls and the sides
and the steps and anything else, even the floor of the pool
just get all the algae off the walls
and mixed into the water so that when we go to shock it,
it'll be able to reach all those algae particles.
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All right, now that we have the whole pool brushed,
we're actually gonna test it.
Now you could have tested, you could have tested the pool
before we did this, just to see where your pH
and alkalinity levels are, but we're gonna do it now.
So we're gonna take a sample
with a boarder bottle or a cup of water
and we're gonna use our test strip to see just
where our pH and alkalinity are.
That's the only two things we're worried about.
Right now I know this pool has a zero chlorine reading,
so the shock's gonna bring that up, but only temporarily,
and then we're gonna make sure
that we have chlorine pucks in the skimmer
because he doesn't have a chlorinator,
we're to make sure that there's pucks in the skimmer,
so that way he gets a residual chlorine reading
of about one to three parts per million.
And finally, it's time to shock the water, okay.
Now, again, we're doing this during the day,
but it is cloudy out so there's no sun involved.
However, I highly recommend that you shock at night
or at dusk and let the filter run continuously
for eight hours overnight, to let that shock mix
into the water and let it kill all the algae it can.
All right, and what's gonna happen is after we shock
the pool chances are that the water
is gonna be a cloudy blue because all of that shock
is gonna destroy those green algae particles
and turn them into this gray matter,
which they'll end up making your pool
look a little bit cloudy.
That's okay, you're just gonna continually
run your filter 24/7 until it clears up,
you can also add a clarifier to help aid that process.
We have a video on how to clarify your,
or how to keep your pool from becoming cloudy
and how to cure it if it does,
so you can watch that video
and I'll shoot a link here down below.
All right.
So that's it for getting rid of algae in a swimming pool.
This was a light colored algae swimming pool.
So if you have a darker color, if it's like a dark
you know, leaf green or almost black,
you're gonna do what I like to call the double shock method,
the triple shock method and the quadruple shock method
for each of those colors.
So this color is just a double shock method,
which for a 20,000 gallon pool, it's two bags of shock
for a single method and then four bags of shock
for a double shock method.
Now, if you have a super green pool
and you have 20,000 gallons,
you would require six bags of shock,
that would be a triple shocking and then eight bags of shock
if you were quadruple shocking.
So for this pool, we're only gonna do four and that's it.
You can visit our website, swimuniversity.com.
And thanks for watching.
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